Often a set of persons with expertise in subject matter, for example reviewers, need to be matched with or assigned to objects related to the subject matter, for examples paper submissions or proposals. In the case of peer reviewed journals or conferences, the process of assigning reviewers to submissions is a time consuming part of the reviewing workflow. Specifically, for the assignment of reviewers to paper submissions in an automated conference management service, it is important to correctly identify reviewers who can serve as expert reviewers for a given submission (that is, expertise of a reviewer matches well to a submission). In such cases, it is important to have good measures to effectively capture the match between a submission and a reviewer. Such measures can be used by a program administrator (e.g., a chairperson) to manually assign submissions to reviewers manually, or the measures may be used to automatically assign reviewers (or a combination of both).
While manual refining of such assignments has been commonly practiced, automating assignment suggestions can be helpful in cases with complex workflows or large number of submissions and reviewers, as well as in the presence of constraints that are typical in such scenarios. Some examples of common constraints include: each submission must have at least some minimal number of reviewers; a reviewer can be assigned no more than a certain maximum number of submissions that make performing assignments a significantly harder. Therefore, integration and customization of such measures can be effective in the assignment process. Today there are several different mechanisms that are used to capture the match between a submission and a reviewer. However, each has limitations and advantages that may vary according to circumstances. There has not previously been any attempt to integrate different ranking methods or to allow a ranking process to be extended to include new types of ranking methods. Techniques related to matching reviewers with review objects are discussed below.